Oil and gas, being distributed through pipelines, typically require chemical addition to mitigate against various undesirable phenomena, such as corrosion, scaling, and solids deposition.
The required concentrations of these chemical agents is relatively low. Unfortunately, existing metering pumps, for delivering these chemical agents, are unable to reliably supply these chemical agents at the low rates required to achieve these relatively low concentrations. As a result, these chemical agents tend to be over-injected, resulting in waste and unnecessary costs. Even if it is attempted to inject chemical agents with existing pumps at relatively low rates, by having the pump stroke over extended periods, the result is more of a pulsed injection, and a relatively significant departure from continuous injection, thereby resulting in non-uniform protection of the process fluid being injected with the chemical agent. Other inherent problems with low pumping rate include the increased risk of vapour lock, or loss of prime, in the pump head.